Trust Your Gut: How does background affect intuitive decision making?
By Cara Walker I felt my whole body tense as I stole several glances to my right and my left. Secretively, I hunched over my desk and made long, deliberate marks with my pen. L…K…E…I tried desperately to recall the shape of the final loop of the “R” in my mom’s signature. My chest was […]
Journalism has a duty to provide in-depth information
By Laura D. Testino The news never stops. Twitter never stops. And Joe Weisenthal never stops. Weisenthal, known online as @TheStalwart, left his position as executive editor of Business Insider a year ago today for a television position with Bloomberg Media. While with Business Insider, New York Magazine published an article about Weisenthal’s media consumption […]
How Immanuel Kant would kill trolls: A deontological approach to dealing with online comments
By Emily Williams The word “troll” used to refer to monsters in fairy tales living under bridges, but in the new age of the internet, troll has taken on a whole new meaning, as the monsters that live behind keyboards and terrorize comment sections on virtually every website. Dealing with trolls, and other maliciously inclined […]
76ers, Redskins and Wells Fargo: On the ethics of not calling things by names that others use
From Philadelphia comes news that the 76ers basketball team refuses to say “Wells Fargo” when referring to the arena where it plays. Wells Fargo, which bought the bank that bought the bank that made the original deal in 1996, owns naming rights until the 29-year, $40 million deal ends in 2025. But that money went […]
Opelika-Auburn News: ‘Finding a way’ to anger nearly everybody
You’re working in The Opelika-Auburn News sports department late on a deadline Saturday night. You should be celebrating in your seat, even if you don’t care who won the big game your paper will blow out in Sunday’s paper. The Auburn Tigers, the team your paper cares about, has held on to beat another Top […]
Re/code shows the power of solid journalism, transparency
I’ve been a fan of Walt Mossberg and Karen Swisher for nearly two decades, since The Birmingham News publisher was smart enough to buy Mossberg’s weekly “Personal Technology” column from The Wall Street Journal to publish in the “My.Tech” section that I created for The News back when AOL and Windows 95 were a thing. […]
Facebook news feed emotion experiment was a failure of journalism ethics, too
News that Facebook manipulated content of nearly 700,000 users continues to make waves, and now a Democratic senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company and researchers properly notified and/or debriefed users that they were being used as experimental subjects. The 2012 experiment tested whether users posted higher levels of positive […]
A student-run newspaper misuses SPJ code of ethics to defend a decision
It’s been a difficult week at the University of California Santa Barbara, where six students died before the killer turned the gun on himself. Tragedy often brings out the best in journalists, who work difficult hours, ask difficult questions, and sometimes stifle their own pain to cover the story. It can be particularly difficult for […]
Knoxville News correctly balanced loyalties, matters of taste in coverage of deadly bus crash
By Anna Ramia Overview On October 2, 2013, a church bus traveling near Knoxville, Tenn. collided with an SUV and a tractor-trailer, killing eight people and injuring 14. The bus’s front-left tire blew out, sending the bus across the median, clipping a car before T-boning the semi-truck. The bus flipped over, and the semi caught […]